Monday, March 6, 2006

"HISTORY ISN'T a court of law"--or so I insisted to Alan
Dershowitz last week in a conference room at Harvard Law School. Dershowitz
didn't strenuously argue the point, as I expected. He gave no sign of turning
into the firebrand his wife calls "the Dersh character," famous for
sarcasm and bad manners in public disputations. The Alan Dershowitz I met
smiled graciously, and waited for me to go on.

I did so by referring to the comparison he made in
"Chutzpah" (1991) between Palestinian refugees and city dwellers
forced to relocate by the ordinary processes of urban renewal. Whatever weird
sense that might make in some court of law, I said, it made no sense when it
came to the dynamics of history. Dershowitz agreed, surprisingly, informing me
that he'd learned a lot about Palestinian suffering since "Chutzpah,"
and that he has always opposed Israeli occupation of the West Bank and
supported a two-state solution.